Posts Tagged ‘quotes’

Many times life happens so quickly that we feel like we just passively watch life goes by. We feel out of control and overwhelmed. We feel any action we may take will be a drop in the ocean, completely useless. We resign.

But that isn’t true my friends.

Taking control over life or letting life take control over us is a decision we make and not a state we get into.

We have full control. All we need is to empower ourselves to take control.

If we think we can do it than we will do it. If we think we are too weak, too small, too _____ [fill in the blank with a diminishing adjective] then we will keep on watching life goes by and remain unsatisfied and constantly disappointed.

Take a look at my niece (in the pink dress) taking control and ruling the dance floor. She doesn’t wait for permission. She doesn’t need dancing lessons. She does not need a title nor a degree. If she feels like dancing with complete and utter joy – she dances and sweeps everyone with her in a swirl of happiness.

We were all once like that. We were all once kids.

We were happy. We did not think about faith, destiny or ‘the rules’. We were not bothered by how things are supposed to be. We took control and lived actively and powerfully.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Stephen William Hawking

Just like looking before crossing the road, we can control any other step we take in life. The secret is to take one step at the time and take over the dance floor.

Share

Do you feel like life goes by or do you take control and live actively? Share and leave a comment on this post.

I think that this life lesson fits perfectly with my two months absence form Creativity Prompt. No matter how well or how badly I plan – life happens eventually.

At first I wanted some time off so I can get ready for my first workshop “Capture Your Dream“. But even after the workshop started and went on fabulously, I still needed some more time to recollect my thoughts and find my focus again. In other words, life happened.

I will soon reopen the registration for the workshop, as a self-paced workshop and I am also going to reveal a few more workshops in the coming months.

Going back to regular posting after a long pause isn’t easy. This quote by Philip Gulley has inspired me to do so:

Too many times we pray for ease, but that’s a prayer seldom met. What we need to do is pray for roots that reach deep into the Eternal, so when the rains fall and the winds blow, we won’t be swept asunder.

To that I will add these three pointers – that has been helping me time and again:

Breathe. The long pause has fed the monster of self doubt and self criticism and it planted fear and overwhelmingness inside us. A deep breathe will cleanse the poison and calm us down.

Lose the negativity. After we have washed away the toxicity we should take care of the monster’s long arms: shame, fear, high expectations and perfectionism. We can banish those calamities by filling ourselves with belief, self acceptance and permission to simply be.

Find focus and thrill. Our body is clean and is radiating with positivity. Now is the time to take a moment, contemplate. Find what drives us. Rekindle our passion and focus on everything that is good about our path which we came back to and started striding on again.

Share

Have you ever felt ‘Life happening’ at full steam? What helped you to go back to your normal routine? Please share by leaving a comment on this post.

For this week’s inspiration prompt I want to share a beautiful quote by Charlotte Joko Beck:

“Life always gives us
exactly the teacher we need
at every moment.
This includes every mosquito,
every misfortune,
every red light,
every traffic jam,
every obnoxious supervisor (or employee),
every illness, every loss,
every moment of joy or depression,
every addiction,
every piece of garbage,
every breath.

The “wedding season” has arrived… Nadav and I also got married in June – two years ago, and the love between us is still growing and thriving.

Romance is an inspiring and motivating force. Love is even more wonderful as it surrounds our lives in so many ways. Granted, we love our significant other; but we also love our family, we love our friends, we love watching the sunrise at dawn.

As with our sweethearts so with the rest of our “objects of love”, a relationship based upon love needs constant cultivating and grooming. It does not sustain itself, but it gives back so much in return. The reward is worth all the hard work. It is absolutely PRICELESS.

For this week’s inspiration prompt, be inspired by love. Love and be loved…

John Lennon had said it beautifully:

Love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep on watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

Share

Share your thoughts and insights about love and loving relationships by leaving a comment on this post.

There is a drawer in which I stack everything I want to do someday when the time is right. The drawer is already overflowing and yet the time is never right for any of the things accumulated there. There is always a hurdle. Always an inconvenience. ALWAYS something better and more important to do. There are always repercussions to take under consideration. The mood is always wrong and the muse always absent.

Life goes by and the right time is never found. We do what we must routinely do and keep on accumulating plans for when the time is right. We may lose track of our plans, but enjoy collecting them nevertheless.

Today I decided to announce: “IT IS TIME”. Today I open the drawer and pick one crumpled paper, written long ago with sparkling eyes and joyous heart, I open it and do whatever it sends me to do. Today it is time.

For this week’s inspiration prompt I invite you to join me and decide today it is time to pick up one dream from that drawer and make it happen.

In the back of that drawer lays the oldest piece of paper. In it is written “Be nicer to people. Be nicer to myself. Be nicer”. It isn’t easy to be nice when life is closing in on you. But today lets start with that piece of paper…

There are fine things which you mean to do some day, under what you think will be more favorable circumstances. But the only time that is surely yours is the present, hence this is the time to speak the word of appreciation and sympathy, to do the generous deed, to forgive the fault of a thoughtless friend, to sacrifice self a little more for others. Today is the day in which to express your noblest qualities of mind and heart, to do at least one worthy thing which you have long postponed, and to use your God-given abilities for the enrichment of someone less fortunate. Today you can make your life significant and worthwhile.

Grenville Kleiser

Share

Do you have a drawer full of plans for when the time is right? share your thoughts and leave a comment.

We are all beautiful people living in a beautiful world. Often the beauty evades us, both our personal beauty and the beauty of our surroundings. On these days we look at the blue sky and can only see a gray veil.

The blue sky, the colorful flowers, the songbirds, the fresh air, our beautiful reflection – they are always going to be there for us. They will keep smoldering and will be waiting for us to take notice.

The beauty is always there, it is our eyes that need to wear the right glasses and watch.

For this week’s inspiration prompt I urge you to take notice and open your eyes to the beauty that surrounds you.

Our mind is extremely powerful. It has the ability to not only analyze our feelings but to found and form them as well. When we think positively everything we do satisfies and fills us with great pleasure and content. When we think that we are sorry little beings we live down to our expectation and measurement.

I am not the first to mention it. Oh no. This notion is as old as humanity itself. Greater and smarter people had taught it times and again, but still it is difficult to implement it on the everyday.

There are so many excuses for not taking this old advice. We do not want to sound vein. We do not want to raise “the evil eye“. We do not want to delude ourselves nor others. We should be realistic. It is much easier teaching about positive thinking than to actually let ourselves think positively when everything seem so negative and wrong. We live in a harsh world.

So many excuses to keep us away from happiness and self fulfillment. None of the excuses is tangible.

For this week’s inspiration prompt I ask you to take a minute and ponder about the founding power of our thought and then use it for empowerment and growth.

Remember:

“It isn’t what you have, or who you are,
or where you are, or what you are doing
that makes you happy or unhappy.
It is what you think about.”Dale Carnegie

Share -

Have you ever experienced the founding power of your thought?
Share your thoughts and leave a comment on this post.

Happiness wanders off sometimes. You go to sleep happy and jolly and wake up to a gloomier day. Or you can drive happily to the office, whistling along with your favorite song, then take a phone call that deflates you of any positive thought you’ve had.

In those days you dig deeper into your core meaning of life and find what are the things you care most about and you focus on them and keep on going at 120 mph. Concentrate only on what’s important and forget about everything which is not.

Be zealous and courageous about everything you love and care about and apathetic about the rest, as the Scottish writer had articulately phrased:

“I had looked for happiness in fast living, but it was not there. I tried to find it in money, but it was not there, either. But when I placed myself in tune with what I believe to be fundamental truths of life, when I began to develop my limited ability, to rid my mind of all kinds of tangled thoughts, and fill it with zeal and courage and love, when I gave myself a chance by treating myself decently and sensibly I began to feel the stimulating, warm glow of happiness, and life for me began to flow like a stream between smooth banks.”

The measure of a man is something illusive, yet we always try to capture it.

We mostly measure ourselves. With severity. We also measure the people we care about, our family and friends. We tend to measure the people we work with – our colleagues and our rivals. Sometimes we measure the person standing before us in the line or crossing the road…

There are so many things that are easy to measure with strict measurement criterions, like length, density, capacity. We pull out the tape measure or the scale or the particle accelerator (the latter would be pulled out by my father at his lab…) and come up with a simple and mostly accurate answer.

That isn’t the case when trying to measure a character.

So what is the measure of a man?

Here is an inspiring quote by Kahlil Gibran explaining how a man should NOT be measured:

To measure you by your smallest deed
is to reckon the ocean by the frailty of its foam.
To judge you by your failures
is to cast blame upon the seasons
for their inconsistencies.

This week I feel a little bit under the weather… It might be all the boxes that finally arrived from Ireland, or it might be the uncustomary rainy days in the Bay area in California or it might be just a virus I caught… Either way, I didn’t want to leave your Monday without an inspiration prompt, so I am sharing a stunning picture I spot on Flickr and an inspiring quote of the Persian philosopher, Jalal ad-Din Rumi.